{"id":2628,"date":"2006-02-02T08:14:36","date_gmt":"2006-02-02T15:14:36","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-02-02T08:14:36","modified_gmt":"2006-02-02T15:14:36","slug":"snake-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/02\/snake-oil\/","title":{"rendered":"Snake Oil"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The best response to the SOTU I&#8217;ve read so far is <a href=http:\/\/sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com\/2006\/02\/very-scary-speech.html>Sheldon Richman&#8217;s<\/a>. How any free-marketeer can stand behind that speech  is beyond me. Leftists should pay attention, too: Richman&#8217;s insights on energy policy deserve serious consideration by those whose rhetoric Bush has co-opted. You think our oil &#8220;addiction&#8221; is the problem, and state subsidization of alternative fuels is the answer? The U.S. government isn&#8217;t immersed in the Middle East because American consumers are jonesing for petrol. Our so-called addiction is merely a pretext for intervention \u2013 economic and military, at home and abroad \u2013 with tidy profits for crony capitalists as a side &#8220;benefit.&#8221; And as long as the state&#8217;s talons are sunk in the energy market, we&#8217;ll be sending troops to &#8220;secure our access&#8221; to the fuel du jour, whatever and wherever it is. <\/p>\n<p>Come to think of it, oil isn&#8217;t the only thing the Middle East has in abundance. I can already hear another U.S. president in the not-too-distant future explaining why we must <a href=http:\/\/businessweek.com\/magazine\/content\/03_34\/b3846024_mz005.htm>stop some backwater from nationalizing its solar panel fields<\/a> \u2013 in the name of national security and democracy, of course.     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The best response to the SOTU I&#8217;ve read so far is Sheldon Richman&#8217;s. How any free-marketeer can stand behind that speech is beyond me. Leftists should pay attention, too: Richman&#8217;s insights on energy policy deserve serious consideration by those whose rhetoric Bush has co-opted. You think our oil &#8220;addiction&#8221; is the problem, and state subsidization [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}